Earlier quoted context omitted.
You and I have very different ideas of dystopia.
Personally I enjoy the basic human rights of privacy and freedom of speech which are deeply lacking in the UK system.
Other people enjoy their children not being shot.
Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
101–110 of 299 posts
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#102distributing for macOS is extremely hostile and Apple continues to extort developers through fees, yearly subscriptions, and of course taking 20-30% in transaction sales.
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#103I don't get the part about Homebrew. If you're using Homebrew, it doesn't make a ton of sense to use Itch.io. Just use Homebrew. Seems like a more appropriate place to distribute a dev tool anyway. You could set up a patreon and print a link to it when appropriate. That's basically what Vim does. I agree that Apple is dumb of course.
They want to have a way for users to pay them. Itch.io has that, homebrew doesn't.
There is no reason to tie the method of payment together with the method of distribution. They could distribute it through brew along with an optional license configuration.
Downloading a cli from a browser is not convenient anyway. You need to copy the downloaded file somewhere that is loaded into the PATH.
And also, software that is downloaded from itch.io app does not require notarization.
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#104I have been developing software for Macs and PCs as an Indie for 20 years now. I sympathize with the author of the post. You get the feeling that Apple thinks you should be grateful that they allow you to develop apps for their platform. The author didn't mention Apple's contempt for backward compatibility. Apple like to regularly nuke their entire developer system from orbit. Try running an app developed 10 years ag…
Honestly, I kind of support this lack of backward compatibility. So many apps I use from big companies are still Intel based and leaving tons of performance on the table. This will finally force them to change when Rosetta is deprecated.
Open source apps are all native.
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#105Author here, just pushed a quick update to the article. To be fair, compared to the prices of Certum and other providers if you ever want to sign something for Windows, perhaps Apple isn't uniquely overpriced (they all seem to be that way): https://www.certum.eu/en/code-signing-certificates/ Looking more into the Windows side of things, I also found Azure Artifact Signing which is supposedly affordable at 8.54 EUR pe…
To avoid having your application blocked by Windows SmartScreen, you need to pay extra for an extended validation code signing certificate. A normal code signing certificate is not sufficient. Here's an eight year old Stack Overflow discussion of the issue: > A guaranteed way to immediately and permanently get rid of the Microsoft SmartScreen warnings is to buy an "Extended Validation" (EV) code signing certificate f…
Microsoft say it's no longer true that EV certificates get special treatment:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/package-and-d...
The only option to avoid a SmartScreen prompt from day 1 on Windows is to distribute through Microsoft Store, end of story.
If you sign it yourself, via Azure or your own $200/year cert, you will get a SmartScreen prompt initially, but the prompt will stop appearing once the file hash has sufficient download history. There is no exact threshold, but it can take several weeks and hundreds of clean installs from a wide audience.
This is from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/package-and-d...
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#106Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#107I have been developing software for Macs and PCs as an Indie for 20 years now. I sympathize with the author of the post. You get the feeling that Apple thinks you should be grateful that they allow you to develop apps for their platform. The author didn't mention Apple's contempt for backward compatibility. Apple like to regularly nuke their entire developer system from orbit. Try running an app developed 10 years ag…
fwiw you can ship through Microsoft Store for free and not have to pay for signing.
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#108Any user who does not like Gatekeeper can turn it off on their machine in ten seconds by running this in a Terminal: sudo spctl —-master-disable People will say, no, that’s too big a hammer, it’s not safe… but then, like, what do you actually want? Either you keep Gatekeeper because you like the friction it introduces, or you don’t like that friction and you should go turn it off. Pick one, you obviously can’t have b…
> what do you actually want? Give me the ability to choose what I trust. “You can either trust Apple and nobody else, even yourself, or you can trust literally everybody” is obviously not a good faith implementation of this. Apple excels at steering the narrative with false conflation and false dichotomy, I’d also remind you of the came-and-went secure boot debate, which Apple successfully steered into Apple owns the…
I think you should read up on how secure boot works with macOS and alternate operating systems before speaking this negatively about the implementation. Apple is already giving you exactly what you’re asking for.
It’s not really even that different than a PC motherboard that gives you “Windows UEFI” and “enroll my own keys” as options.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/
As far as code signing, again, what do you want Apple to do here? They already gave you a master switch to turn it off. You are free to turn it off then implement your own third party code signing solution if you’d rather choose who you trust. It’s not Apple’s fault if nobody else decided to make their own trust repositories and the only alternative on the market is to have no safeguard at all.
And let’s not forget who Apple markets their computers to. These features aren’t for you and me, they’re for the non-technical customers who will absolutely get pwned by unsigned code. Go to the MacBook Neo marketing page and try to find a single image of someone writing code or even being gainfully employed.
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#109Any user who does not like Gatekeeper can turn it off on their machine in ten seconds by running this in a Terminal: sudo spctl —-master-disable People will say, no, that’s too big a hammer, it’s not safe… but then, like, what do you actually want? Either you keep Gatekeeper because you like the friction it introduces, or you don’t like that friction and you should go turn it off. Pick one, you obviously can’t have b…
I do not think this is the right way. The right way would be for Apple to allow for a free Developer ID for distribution if the app is free and has no in-app purchases.
This provides IMO all-around goodwill while still adhering to good release practices.
Re: Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels
#1101 year ago i would have agreed with you. Today, I'm going to take the other side on this. The amount of malicious code embedded in software now is going up exponentially. Yes this is a painful tax imposed on all software, malicious or not, but until they figure out a better system, this system actually will disuade a certain percentage of malicious actors to give up - ESPECIALLY having to pay a fee. As a mac user, i want to know if the developer has paid a significant fee to get this software to me. It a useful signal for me. If they didn't pay and didn't upload their passport, I really want think think hard about the risks involved for myself when I run this thing.